1. Technical Field
The invention relates to a medical tool, particularly a hollow needle for an instrument used in ocular surgery for the in-vivo disintegration of organic lenses by means of ultrasound, having a functional part and a connector part, with the connector part having handling means and serving to provide a removable connection to a handle. The invention further relates to a method for the production of such a medical tool.
2. Description of Related Art
Medical tools of the type under discussion have been known in practice for years. Concretely, such a medical tool may be, for example, an ultrasound-activated hollow needle for an ocular surgery instrument. Purely by way of example, we refer here to DE 10 2008 023 967 A1.
Ultrasound-activated hollow needles are used in cataract operations in the field of ocular surgery for the purpose of disintegrating lenses. To this end, the free end of the hollow needle—the functional part—is placed in high-frequency axial motion and moved directly toward the cataract. Ultrasound waves are emitted by the functional part in order to emulsify the tissue. Lens debris is suctioned off by the hollow needle along with a liquid supplied to the eye.
Before the operation, the medical tool must be connected to a handle via a connector part. If the hand-held medical equipment is an ultrasound-activated hollow needle for use in ocular surgery, said needle is connected to a handle that causes the functional part to oscillate and that suctions off lens debris. It is further known from the prior art for the connector part of the tool to have handling means. In order to connect the tool to the handle in the simplest manner possible, it may be gripped on the handling means. The handling means are embodied in an integral fashion with the connector part.
In order for the patient to recover after the surgery as quickly as possible, the attempt is made to conduct the intervention with a low level of trauma. Here, we wish to refer by way of example to the hollow needles used in ocular surgery, which are designed to be extremely small, with the trend in development moving toward ever-smaller dimensions and smaller lumens of the tools and hollow needles. However, it is problematic that tools that have already been used once cannot be reliably prepared or sterilized because their small dimensions and lumens. Therefore, patients are subjected to the realistic risk of cross-contamination if the tool has already been used and subsequently not correctly sterilized. Infections such as, for example, hepatitis or HIV may be transmitted in this manner.
Another problem lies in the fact that material fatigue occurs in the tools due to the small dimensions that, in an extreme case, may even cause the tool to break. Safely using tools that are placed into oscillation—such as, for example, hollow needles used in ocular surgery—multiple times is therefore not possible. The risk of injury to the patient is too high in the case of multiple uses of preprocessed tools.